Journal articles: 'Grammatical constraints'

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Kim, Nayoun, Katy Carlson, Mike Dickey, and Masaya Yoshida. "Processing gapping: Parallelism and grammatical constraints." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 73, no. 5 (February 24, 2020): 781–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820903461.

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This study aims to test two hypotheses about the online processing of Gapping: whether the parser inserts an ellipsis site in an incremental fashion in certain coordinated structures (the Incremental Ellipsis Hypothesis), or whether ellipsis is a late and dispreferred option (the Ellipsis as a Last Resort Hypothesis). We employ two offline acceptability rating experiments and a sentence fragment completion experiment to investigate to what extent the distribution of Gapping is controlled by grammatical and extra-grammatical constraints. Furthermore, an eye-tracking while reading experiment demonstrated that the parser inserts an ellipsis site incrementally but only when grammatical and extra-grammatical constraints allow for the insertion of the ellipsis site. This study shows that incremental building of the Gapping structure follows from the parser’s general preference to keep the structure of the two conjuncts maximally parallel in a coordination structure as well as from grammatical restrictions on the distribution of Gapping such as the Coordination Constraint.

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Price, P. J., Y. ‐L Chow, M. O. Dunham, O. Kimball, M. Krasner, F. Kubala, J. Makhoul, S. Roucos, and R. Schwartz. "Grammatical constraints and recognition performance." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 80, S1 (December 1986): S18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.2023686.

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Meisel, Jürgen M. "Code-Switching in Young Bilingual Children." Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16, no. 4 (December 1994): 413–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0272263100013449.

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This study examines the role of grammatical prerequisites on code-switching in young bilingual children. It is proposed that code-switching is constrained not only by grammatical properties of the languages involved; it is also regulated by principles and mechanisms of language use. Constraints on code-switching are therefore defined as processing principles that, however, depend on grammatical knowledge. They ensure that switching does not result in a violation of grammatical coherence, defined in terms of both linear sequencing and structural configuration. Some of these claims are tested empirically, analyzing the speech of two bilingual children acquiring French and German simultaneously. It is argued that even in the earliest uses of mixing, constraints are not violated; in many cases they do not apply because the relevant grammatical relations do not yet hold. Code-switching is nevertheless used from early on in accordance with these constraints, as soon as a certain kind of grammatical knowledge is accessible. Most importantly, functional categories have to be implemented in the child's grammar.

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Abdurrahman, Israa B. "HOW HAS OPTIMALITY THEORY ACHIEVED THE GOALS OF LINGUISTIC THEORY." Al-Adab Journal, no. 111 (March 15, 2015): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.31973/aj.v0i111.1530.

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Optimality Theory (OT) is a grammatical framework of recent origin presented by Prince and Smolensky in 1993. The central idea of Optimality Theory is that surface forms of language reflect resolutions of conflicts between competing constraints. A surface form is ‘optimal’ in the sense that it incurs the least serious violations of a set of violable constraints, ranked in a language-specific hierarchy. Constraints are universal and languages differ in the ranking of constraints, giving priorities to some constraints over others. Such rankings are based on ‘strict’ domination: if one constraint outranks another, the higher-ranked constraint has priority, regardless of violations of the lower-ranked one. However, such violation must be minimal, which predicts the economy property of grammatical processes. This paper tries to seek the clues to prove that optimality theory achieves the goals of linguistic theory successfully

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Forrest, Jon. "Community rules and speaker behavior: Individual adherence to group constraints on (ING)." Language Variation and Change 27, no. 3 (September 16, 2015): 377–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394515000137.

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AbstractThis paper investigates the degree to which individual speakers follow the morphosyntactic hierarchy governing grammatical constraints on (ING) in the Southern U.S. city of Raleigh, North Carolina. (ING) was used as the variable of study for its well-studied internal constraints and comparability to previous studies on the internal constraints oft/ddeletion. A lexical category constraint hierarchy for the community was determined via multivariate mixed-effects statistical models, and each speaker's (ING) pattern was compared to this hierarchy. Results show maintenance in grammatical constraints even when taking phonological factors into account, unlike some work ont/ddeletion. Uniformity exists across speakers with respect to the ordering of internal constraints despite the overall decline in rates of –inover time, but constraint weights (expressed as log odds) vary significantly from speaker to speaker, with no correlates to social or internal factors. These results have consequences for representation of individuals in terms of an aggregate pattern, questioning the consistency of factor weight values at the speaker level despite consistent ordering of constraints.

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Kostic, Aleksandar, and Milena Bozic. "Constraints on probability distributions of grammatical forms." Psihologija 40, no. 1 (2007): 5–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/psi0701005k.

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In this study we investigate the constraints on probability distribution of grammatical forms within morphological paradigms of Serbian language, where paradigm is specified as a coherent set of elements with defined criteria for inclusion. Thus, for example, in Serbian all feminine nouns that end with the suffix "a" in their nominative singular form belong to the third declension, the declension being a paradigm. The notion of a paradigm could be extended to other criteria as well, hence, we can think of noun cases, irrespective of grammatical number and gender, or noun gender, irrespective of case and grammatical number, also as paradigms. We took the relative entropy as a measure of homogeneity of probability distribution within paradigms. The analysis was performed on 116 morphological paradigms of typical Serbian and for each paradigm the relative entropy has been calculated. The obtained results indicate that for most paradigms the relative entropy values fall within a range of 0.75 - 0.9. Nonhomogeneous distribution of relative entropy values allows for estimating the relative entropy of the morphological system as a whole. This value is 0.69 and can tentatively be taken as an index of stability of the morphological system.

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Meyer, Charles F. "GRAMMATICAL AND PRAGMATIC EFFECTS ON EMPATHY CONSTRAINTS." Studia Linguistica 40, no. 2 (December 1986): 122–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9582.1986.tb00766.x.

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Omaki, Akira. "Grammatical constraints and reductionism in sentence processing." Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 3, no. 3 (September 16, 2013): 330–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lab.3.3.10oma.

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Fried, Mirjam. "Constructing grammatical meaning." Studies in Language 31, no. 4 (August 14, 2007): 721–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.31.4.02fri.

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In a usage-based analysis of four syntactic reflexives in Czech, this paper examines the question of representing speakers’ knowledge of polyfunctional grammatical categories. I argue that the reflexives form a prototype-based network of partially overlapping grammatical patterns, organized by the pragmatic concept of unexpected referential status in agent–patient relations. This concept is manifested in four distinct communicative functions: marking referential identity between agent and patient roles; distancing discourse participants from their involvement in the reported event; recasting a transitive event as a spontaneous change of state; expressing an attitude toward the reported event. Each function is shown to conventionally co-occur with a set of properties involving various combinations of the following: preferences in aspect and transitivity; semantic and/or pragmatic constraints on agents and patients; verb semantics; shifts in modality and pragmatic force; morphosyntactic constraints. Overall, the analysis supports the view that grammatical categories cannot be properly defined outside of broader grammatical context, thus arguing for a constructional approach to linguistic structure and for re-interpreting the principle of isomorphism in terms of ‘constructions’ in the sense of Construction Grammar.

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Coetzee, Andries W. "A comprehensive model of phonological variation: grammatical and non-grammatical factors in variable nasal place assimilation." Phonology 33, no. 2 (August 2016): 211–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675716000117.

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The past two decades have seen the development of several constraint-based models of phonological grammar that can handle variable phenomena. Most of these models, however, are purely grammatical, and do not allow for the contribution of non-grammatical factors towards determining the frequency structure of variation. This paper reviews different approaches to phonological variation, focusing on how grammatical and non-grammatical factors co-determine patterns of variation. Based on this review, a model is developed that incorporates influences from both grammatical and non-grammatical factors. The proposed model is grammar-dominant, in the sense that grammar defines the space of possible variation while non-grammatical factors only contribute towards the frequency with which the grammar determined forms are observed. Following Coetzee & Kawahara (2013), the model is developed in a version of noisy Harmonic Grammar that allows non-grammatical factors to scale the weights of faithfulness constraints up or down.

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Baranov, A. N., and D. O. Dobrovol’skij. "Realization of the number category of nouns in Russian idioms: grammar, inner form, and meaning." Sibirskiy filologicheskiy zhurnal, no. 4 (2020): 224–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.17223/18137083/73/15.

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The paper discusses the limitations on the realization of the number category of nouns in the structure of Russian idioms. The main source of the material was the vocabulary of the “Idiom Dictionary of the Russian Academy of Sciences” (2015). The relevant limitations are shown to be determined by general grammatical factors, factors of semantics (meaning) of idioms, as well as features of pragmatics and inner form. An interesting case of constraints on the formation on the plural can be considered the characteristic of the referent of a given id-iom: the uniqueness of a person (luchshiy drug sovetskikh fizkul’turnikov), a political subject (bol’shaya semerka), an event (velikiy oktyabr’), the uniqueness of the place (lobnoe mesto), and the time period (kamennyy vek). The constraint on the singular is largely determined by grammatical factors (imeniny serdtsa). The features of the idiom structure can also influence the implementation of the number category: rhyme, rhythm, and unique components (e.g., outdated and constructed words). Grammatical constraints turn out to be more regular. Some semantic and pragmatic constraints can also be predicted. However, a significant part of the semantic restrictions and constraints associated with the model of the inner form are selective. In a systematic analysis of idioms, regular factors are described by general rules, and unique ones are specified for each idiom. The study of the number category in idioms is part of an important program to study the implementation of grammatical categories in phraseology.

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Lipski, John M. "Field-Testing Code-Switching Constraints: A Report on a Strategic Languages Project." Languages 4, no. 1 (February 1, 2019): 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages4010007.

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The present article provides an overview of ongoing field-based research that deploys a variety of interactive experimental procedures in three strategically chosen bilingual contact environments, whose language dyads facilitate a partial separation of morphosyntactic factors in order to test the extent to which proposed grammatical constraints on intra-sentential code-switching are independent of language-specific factors. For purposes of illustration, the possibility of language switches between subject pronouns and verbs is compared for the three bilingual groups. The first scenario includes Ecuadoran Quichua and Media Lengua (entirely Quichua syntax and system morphology, all lexical roots replaced by Spanish items; both are null-subject languages). The second juxtaposes Spanish and the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero; the languages share highly cognate lexicons but differ substantially in grammatical structures (including null subjects in Spanish, only overt subjects in Palenquero). Spanish and Portuguese in north-eastern Argentina along the Brazilian border form the third focus: lexically and grammatically highly cognate languages that are nonetheless kept distinct by speakers (both null-subject languages, albeit with different usage patterns). Results from the three communities reveal a residual resistance against pronoun + verb switches irrespective of the subject-verb configuration, thereby motivating the application of similar techniques to other proposed grammatical constraints.

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Heller, Jordana R., and Matthew Goldrick. "Grammatical constraints on phonological encoding in speech production." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 21, no. 6 (April 1, 2014): 1576–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0616-3.

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Demuth, Katherine. "Prosodic constraints on children’s use of grammatical morphemes." First Language 39, no. 1 (January 8, 2018): 80–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0142723717751984.

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It has long been known that children may use a particular grammatical morpheme inconsistently at early stages of acquisition. Although this has often been thought to be evidence of incomplete syntactic representations, there is now a large body of crosslinguistic evidence showing that much of this early within-speaker variability is due to still developing phonological and/or prosodic representations. This article reviews recent research showing how a phonological approach to the emergence of grammatical morphology makes it possible to make crosslinguistic predictions about what will be acquired early and what acquired late. This is known as the Prosodic Licensing Hypothesis, providing a unified framework for understanding the course of morphosyntactic development across languages. The implications are both theoretical and methodological, suggesting that children may know more about the grammar of their language at an earlier age than is often assumed, and that this can only be revealed by taking prosodic phonology into account in designing early tests of syntactic development.

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Krämer, Martin, and Barbara Vogt. "Alignment and locality in the typology of affixing language games." Linguistic Review 35, no. 1 (January 26, 2018): 83–120. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2017-0018.

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Abstract This paper contributes to the discussion around the (extra-)grammatical status of language games (or ludlings). We collected over 60 games which are based on the affixation of a dummy morpheme, which is infixed and iterated in most cases. While some are obviously reduplicative, closer investigation reveals that all the games involving iterativity function like reduplication. Our optimality-theoretic analysis concentrates on the explanation of shape, segmental content, placement and iterativity of the dummy affix and employs only constraints standardly assumed in the literature on reduplication. We show that no ludling-specific constraints or stipulations are necessary to account for this typology and make predictions on limitations that presumably apply to typological variation with regard to language games. Ludlings are thus variations of grammatical constraint rankings.

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Schmidt, Deborah Schlindwein. "Rules Versus Constraints in Plains Cree Phonology." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 23, no. 1 (September 17, 1997): 327. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v23i1.1285.

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Vaysman, Olga. "Against Richness of the Base: Evidence from Nganasan." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 28, no. 1 (August 14, 2002): 327. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v28i1.3848.

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Since Optimality Theory is a highly output-oriented grammatical theory, the strongest hypothesis is that all systematic, language-particular patterns are the result of output constraints, and that there is no other place from which such patterns can derive. In particular, input is not a level of derivation that can be constrained. This principle is known as Richness of the Base hypothesis, and it states that there are no constraints on the input structure of words, and that all linguistic constraints are statements on the surface structure only. In other words, Richness of the Base attributes all systematic phonological patterns to constraint rankings, not to difference in inputs. In this paper, I consider some consonant gradation facts from a Uralic Samoyedic language Nganasan, and argue that (at least the strict interpretation of) the Richness of the Base hypothesis runs into problems when we deal with full range of relevant data from this language, namely isolated words, compounds, and borrowings.

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Neville, Helen, Janet L. Nicol, Andrew Barss, Kenneth I. Forster, and Merrill F. Garrett. "Syntactically Based Sentence Processing Classes: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3, no. 2 (April 1991): 151–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn.1991.3.2.151.

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Theoretical considerations and diverse empirical data from clinical, psycholinguistic, and developmental studies suggest that language comprehension processes are decomposable into separate subsystems, including distinct systems for semantic and grammatical processing. Here we report that event-related potentials (ERPs) to syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous sentences produced a pattern of brain activity that is distinct in timing and distribution from the patterns elicited by syntactically deviant sentences, and further, that different types of syntactic deviance produced distinct ERP patterns. Forty right-handed young adults read sentences presented at 2 words/sec while ERPs were recorded from over several positions between and within the hemispheres. Half of the sentences were semantically and grammatically acceptable and were controls for the remainder, which contained sentence medial words that violated (1) semantic expectations, (2) phrase structure rules, or (3) WH-movement constraints on Specificity and (4) Subjacency. As in prior research, the semantic anomalies produced a negative potential, N400, that was bilaterally distributed and was largest over posterior regions. The phrase structure violations enhanced the N125 response over anterior regions of the left hemisphere, and elicited a negative response (300-500 msec) over temporal and parietal regions of the left hemisphere. Violations of Specificity constraints produced a slow negative potential, evident by 125 msec, that was also largest over anterior regions of the left hemisphere. Violations of Subjacency constraints elicited a broadly and symmetrically distributed positivity that onset around 200 msec. The distinct timing and distribution of these effects provide biological support for theories that distinguish between these types of grammatical rules and constraints and more generally for the proposal that semantic and grammatical processes are distinct subsystems within the language faculty.

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Singh, Rajendra. "Grammatical Constraints on Code-Mixing: Evidence from Hindi-English." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 30, no. 1 (1985): 33–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008413100010677.

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Paradis (1980:501) observes that bilingual language switching has been studied from many angles. Linguistic studies have investigated where in the sentence a switch is more likely to occur, whether within or between constituents, for instance. Social psychologists have probed the reason why a bilingual is likely to switch between languages. Sociolinguistic studies, by far the most numerous, have looked into the external social conditions that control when switches are likely to occur. How bilinguals are able to keep their languages apart and are able to switch from one to the other has been the subject of investigation of psycholinguistic studies, and the neurolinguist has asked what brain mechanisms are responsible for the switching.

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Leung, Janny H. C., and John N. Williams. "Constraints on Implicit Learning of Grammatical Form-Meaning Connections." Language Learning 62, no. 2 (April 4, 2011): 634–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2011.00637.x.

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Giancaspro, David. "Code-switching at the auxiliary-VP boundary." Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 5, no. 3 (July 24, 2015): 379–407. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lab.5.3.04gia.

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While early code-switching research (i.e., Poplack, 1980) focused on the possibility of universal constraints on switching, MacSwan’s (2010, 2014) “Constraint-Free” research program centers on the notion that code-switching is only constrained by the interaction of a bilingual’s two grammars. In following with this proposal, the current study examines whether two types of Spanish-English bilinguals are equally sensitive to the (un)grammaticality of Spanish-English code-switching at the subject-predicate and auxiliary-verb phrase boundaries. Twenty-five heritage Spanish speakers and forty-four L2 Spanish learners completed an Audio Naturalness Judgment Task in which they judged grammatical and ungrammatical Spanish-English code-switching at these two syntactic junctions. Results indicate that the L2 Spanish speakers and the heritage bilinguals, regardless of their self-reported exposure to code-switching, correctly differentiated between grammatical and ungrammatical switches, suggesting that they have implicit knowledge of code-switching grammaticality which falls out from syntactic knowledge of the two languages.

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Teston-Bonnard, Sandra. "Règles d’ordre des éléments Non Régis." Ordre des mots et topologie de la phrase française 29, no. 1 (July 6, 2006): 183–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/li.29.1.16tes.

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In the first part of the paper we give an overwiew of a natural syntactic class of constituents defined by means of a specific set of criteria : the “non régis” (NR) (non integrated in the grammatical structure of the utterance). This class, gathers, various kinds of grammatical units of non canonical syntactic status in traditional descriptions : sentence adverbials, appositions, interjections, non canonical subordinate clauses, discourse particles… In the second part of the paper we show that, contrary to current assumptions, these linguistic units are not randomly combined with the core elements of the sentence. They are inserted in the utterance according to specific ordering rules and distributional constraints. These constraints are studied at two levels : constraints on their possible insertions in grammatical structures (microsyntax), constraints on the positions they can occupy in relation with the “macrosyntactic” nucleus of the utterance (the part of the utterance bearing its illocutionnary force) as defined in Blanche-Benveniste (84, 90).

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Levin, Beth. "The elasticity of verb meaning revisited." Semantics and Linguistic Theory 27 (December 7, 2017): 571. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v27i0.4187.

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This paper investigates the source of systematic argument realization differences among two classes of manner verbs, hitting and wiping verbs. Its starting point is the hypothesis that argument realization patterns can largely be attributed to grammatical constraints on argument expression interacting with grammatically privileged properties of a verb's root. These properties include the root's ontological category and, as argued here, whether it encodes contact at a point or a region.

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Bordag, Denisa, and Thomas Pechmann. "Grammatical gender in translation." Second Language Research 24, no. 2 (April 2008): 139–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267658307086299.

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In three experiments native speakers of Czech translated bare nouns and gender-marked adjective + noun phrases into German, their second language (L2). In Experiments 1-3 we explored the so-called gender interference effect from first language (L1) as observed in previous picture naming studies (naming latencies were longer when the L1 noun and its L2 translation had different genders than when their genders were congruent). In Experiments 2 and 3 we investigated the influence of gender transparency in L2 (longer latencies when an L2 noun has a gender-atypical or gender-ambiguous termination than when its termination is gender-typical). Although both effects were observed in L2 picture naming, only the gender transparency effect could be demonstrated in L1 to L2 translation tasks. The resulting constraints on L2 gender processing during translation are discussed in the framework of bilingual speech production models.

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Meechan, Marjory. "Jeff MacSwan, A minimalist approach to intrasentential codeswitching. New York and London: Garland, 1999. Pp. xxvi, 305. Hb $76.00." Language in Society 30, no. 2 (April 2001): 285–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404501272054.

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In this book, MacSwan accounts for code-switching constraints between Spanish and Nahuatl, a Uto-Aztecan language of central Mexico, while testing two main hypotheses: (1) Nothing constrains code-switching apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars; and (2) code-switchers have the same grammatical competence as monolinguals for the languages they use (p. 22).

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Tesar, Bruce, and Paul Smolensky. "Learnability in Optimality Theory." Linguistic Inquiry 29, no. 2 (April 1998): 229–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002438998553734.

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In this article we show how Optimality Theory yields a highly general Constraint Demotion principle for grammar learning. The resulting learning procedure specifically exploits the grammatical structure of Optimality Theory, independent of the content of substantive constraints defining any given grammatical module. We decompose the learning problem and present formal results for a central subproblem, deducing the constraint ranking particular to a target language, given structural descriptions of positive examples. The structure imposed on the space of possible grammars by Optimality Theory allows efficient convergence to a correct grammar. We discuss implications for learning from overt data only, as well as other learning issues. We argue that Optimality Theory promotes confluence of the demands of more effective learnability and deeper linguistic explanation.

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Grodzinsky, Yosef, and Lisa Finkel. "The Neurology of Empty Categories: Aphasics' Failure to Detect Ungrammaticality." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 10, no. 2 (March 1998): 281–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/089892998562708.

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A direct investigation into the grammatical abilities of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics sought to obtain critical evidence for a revised model of the functional neuroanatomy of language. We examined aphasics' ability to make grammaticality judgments on a set of theoretically selected, highly complex syntactic structures that involve, most prominently, fine violations of constraints on syntactic movement. Although both groups have been thought to possess intact abilities in this domain, we discovered severe deficits: Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics (whose performances differed) exhibited clear, delineated, and grammatically characterizable deficits—they follow from the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis, which is motivated by independent comprehension results. These conclusions have both linguistic and neurological implications: Linguistically, they show that the aphasic deficit interacts with more than one module of the grammar. Namely, it manifests not only when the thematic module is called for in interpretive tasks but also when constraints on syntactic movement are tapped in a study of judgment. Neurologically, the results support a view of receptive grammatical mechanisms in the left cortex, which is functionally more restrictive than currently assumed; neuroanatomically, however, it is more distributed.

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Laleko, Oksana, and Maria Polinsky. "Marking Topic or Marking Case: A Comparative Investigation of Heritage Japanese and Heritage Korean." Heritage Language Journal 10, no. 2 (September 30, 2013): 178–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.46538/hlj.10.2.3.

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In this paper, we examine the relationship between grammatical and discourse-related domains of linguistic organization in heritage speakers by comparing their knowledge of categories mediated at different structural levels: grammatical case marking, which is mediated within the structure of the clause, and the marking of information structure, grammatically mediated at the syntax-discourse interface. To this end, we examine the knowledge of case and topic particles in heritage speakers and L2 learners of Japanese and Korean as assessed through a series of rating tasks. We find that heritage speakers in both languages experience different degrees of difficulty with elements that belong to different linguistic modules: phenomena which involve semantic and discourse computation are found to be more difficult than phenomena governed primarily by structural syntactic constraints.

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Piggott, G. L. "Theoretical implications of segment neutrality in nasal harmony." Phonology 20, no. 3 (December 2003): 375–424. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675704000053.

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In nasal harmony systems, any major consonant class (excluding laryngeal glides) may fail to undergo nasalisation. This paper proposes to derive the neutrality of stops, fricatives, liquids and glides from the satisfaction of a special set of faithfulness constraints; each member of the set commands the presence of a particular segment class in a consonant inventory. The analysis requires that the constraint commanding the presence of stops be active in every grammar and invariably take precedence over the demands of nasal harmony. The explanation of stop neutrality forces a rethinking of the nature of constraints and how they interact. The paper argues that the constraints regulating the cross-linguistic manifestation of segment neutrality are either universal grammatical features (i.e. principles) or language-specific choices (i.e. parameters of variation). It also postulates that constraint interaction is regulated by a set of metaconditions that determine ordering; constraint ranking is not random.

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IMAICHI, OSAMU, YUJI MATSUMOTO, and MASAKAZU FUJIO. "An Integrated Parsing Method using Stochastic Information and Grammatical Constraints." Journal of Natural Language Processing 5, no. 3 (1998): 67–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.5715/jnlp.5.3_67.

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Heller, Jordana R., and Matthew Goldrick. "Erratum to: Grammatical constraints on phonological encoding in speech production." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 22, no. 5 (August 20, 2015): 1475. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0928-y.

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Cardini, Filippo-Enrico. "Grammatical constraints and verb-framed languages: The case of Italian." Language and Cognition 4, no. 3 (September 2012): 167–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/langcog-2012-0010.

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AbstractIn the literature on motion events, a lot of previous research can be found on the contrast between the typology of expression favoured by so-called ‘verb-framed languages’ and that favoured by so-called ‘satellite-framed languages.’ Only some of this previous research, however, has focused its attention on the reasons that ultimately bring about such contrasting fashions of speaking. The present study explores this issue in some depth by trying to identify what specific grammatical constraints lead Italian speakers to be shy of the use of manner verbs in the expression of motion events (at least when compared with speakers of a typical satellite-framed language such as English). The outcome of an interpretation task and a grammatical judgement task conducted with some Italian native speakers suggests that this phenomenon ultimately originates from features exhibited by the Italian system of spatial prepositions, as well as from features exhibited by a certain kind of Italian manner verbs. The constraints caused by the verbs appear to be particularly significant.

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OSAWA, N. "Jigsaw-Puzzle-Like 3D Glyphs for Visualization of Grammatical Constraints." IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems E91-D, no. 6 (June 1, 2008): 1804–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ietisy/e91-d.6.1804.

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BOBB, SUSAN C., JUDITH F. KROLL, and CARRIE N. JACKSON. "Lexical constraints in second language learning: Evidence on grammatical gender in German*." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18, no. 3 (October 23, 2014): 502–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1366728914000534.

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The present study asked whether or not the apparent insensitivity of second language (L2) learners to grammatical gender violations reflects an inability to use grammatical information during L2 lexical processing. Native German speakers and English speakers with intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency in German performed a translation-recognition task. On critical trials, an incorrect translation was presented that either matched or mismatched the grammatical gender of the correct translation. Results show interference for native German speakers in conditions in which the incorrect translation matched the gender of the correct translation. Native English speakers, regardless of German proficiency, were insensitive to the gender mismatch. In contrast, these same participants were correctly able to assign gender to critical items. These findings suggest a dissociation between explicit knowledge and the ability to use that information under speeded processing conditions and demonstrate the difficulty of L2 gender processing at the lexical level.

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Husband, E. Matthew. "Speaking of death." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 373, no. 1754 (July 16, 2018): 20180172. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0172.

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As a human-specific trait, language offers a unique window on human cognition. Grammatical constraints on the ways we speak about events, for instance, have long been thought to reveal the representational formats that our minds impose on the ways that we think about events. In recent research, verbs that name events of death have stood out as key counterexamples to standard theories of the grammatical constraints on possible verbs. The special status of these thanatological verbs raises two important questions: why, given the vast number of verbs in any language, is it that verbs of death hold this special status, and what do they tell us about the restrictions on the representational format for possible verbs? This paper reexamines the evidence coming from verbs of death, confirming that they are counterexamples to standard theories, but that their behaviour suggests a more revealing constraint on our mental representations—that our minds impose strict restrictions on the format of asserted meaning. Thus, the constraints on linguistic representation and the human mind offer a unique perspective on the mental representations of thanatological phenomena. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary thanatology: impacts of the dead on the living in humans and other animals’.

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Park, Mihi, and Rebecca Lurie Starr. "The acquisition of L3 variation among early bilinguals." Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10, no. 5 (January 8, 2019): 657–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lab.17066.par.

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Abstract The present study investigates whether prior experience with formal study of an L2 influences L3 Korean learners’ Type 1 variation (i.e., use of obligatory forms) and Type 2 variation (i.e., variation between alternative acceptable variants). The patterns of variation in Korean argument realization of early bilingual learners (English-Chinese/Malay/Indonesian/Tamil) of L3 Korean were assessed in light of the distribution of variants present in classroom input, learners’ prior L2 learning experience and home language background, argument animacy and number, and familiarity of verb structure type. Our findings demonstrate that prior experience with a typologically-similar L2 facilitates acquisition of grammatical patterns as well as acquisition of native-like patterns of variation between grammatical forms that are constrained by a range of internal linguistic factors. Any L2 experience, regardless of typological proximity, is found to facilitate acquisition of internal linguistic constraints, but not acquisition of grammatical patterns.

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Bayley, Robert, Ceil Lucas, and Mary Rose. "Phonological variation in American Sign Language: The case of 1 handshape." Language Variation and Change 14, no. 1 (March 2002): 19–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394502141020.

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This article examines variation in American Sign Language (ASL) signs produced with a 1 handshape, which include signs of nearly all grammatical classes. Multivariate analysis of more than 5,000 tokens, extracted from informal conversations among more than 200 signers in seven different regions of the United States, indicates that variation in the form of these signs is conditioned by multiple linguistic and social factors. Significant factor groups include grammatical function and features of the preceding and following segments, as well as a range of social constraints including age, regional origin, and language background. Two findings are especially notable. First, although the results for preceding and following segment effects show evidence of progressive and regressive assimilation, grammatical function is the first-order linguistic constraint on the use of two of the three main variants. Second, signers in all regions of the United States show similar patterns of variation, thus providing evidence that ASL signers constitute a single “speech” community.

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Labov, William. "The child as linguistic historian." Language Variation and Change 1, no. 1 (March 1989): 85–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500000120.

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ABSTRACTThough the diachronic dimension of linguistic variation is often identified with linguistic change, many stable linguistic variables with no synchronic motivation show historical continuity with little change over long periods of time. Children acquire at an early age historically transmitted constraints on variables that appear to have no communicative significance, such as the grammatical conditioning of (ing) in English. Studies of (td) and (ing) in King of Prussia families show that children have matched their parents' patterns of variation by age 7, before many categorical phonological and grammatical rules are established. Some dialect-specific and socially marked constraints are acquired before constraints with general articulatory motivation. Constraints on (td) appear in the speech of a 4-year-old, but there is no evidence in the productions of a 2-year-old child in the same family.

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Goldberg, Adele E. "Words by Default: Optimizing Constraints and the Persian Complex Predicate." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 22, no. 1 (September 25, 1996): 132. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v22i1.1360.

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Skiba, Romuald, and Norbert Dittmar. "Pragmatic, Semantic, and Syntactic Constraints and Grammaticalization." Studies in Second Language Acquisition 14, no. 3 (September 1992): 323–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0272263100011141.

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This contribution will compare the acquisition of German of three adult Poles over a period of 3 years. As background to the acquisition of grammatical features in German (e. g., morphology, auxiliary and modal verbs, constituency structure, temporality), an acquisition profile of the informants will be constructed. With the help of computer-aided corpus descriptions, the sequences in acquisition will be specified.

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Nichols, Lynn. "Lexical semantic constraints on noun roots and noun borrowability." Parts of Speech: Descriptive tools, theoretical constructs 32, no. 3 (September 3, 2008): 683–700. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.32.3.10nic.

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While nouns are thought to be more easily borrowed than verbs, this investigation demonstrates that there may be limitations on noun borrowing into certain languages. The case of Zuni is examined, in which conditions of contact similar to that of neighboring languages nevertheless result in a different treatment of the noun lexicon. The possibility of borrowing natural kind nouns into Zuni exists alongside a tendency against borrowing nouns of the artifact type. It is argued that the source of this tendency against artifact noun borrowing in Zuni is the grammatical complexity of the lexical semantic representation for these nouns: grammatical complexity in Zuni noun roots appears to be dispreferred. These findings belie the claim of Thomason and Kaufman (1988) that “any linguistic feature can be transferred to any other language” given an appropriate degree of contact.

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Meyerhoff, Miriam. "Formal and cultural constraints on optional objects in Bislama." Language Variation and Change 14, no. 3 (October 2002): 323–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394502143031.

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Bislama allows phonetically overt and phonetically null noun phrases (NPs) in argument positions. This article explores constraints on the occurrence of null NPs in direct object position. Discourse factors (given/new status of referent, antecedent's form) and syntactic factors (antecedent's grammatical role, identification by a transitive suffix) are investigated. Morphosyntactic and semantic features that might transfer from substrate languages (referent's animacy, (in)alienable possession) and social factors (age, sex, language of education) are also examined. Strong priming effects for grammatical role of the antecedent and form of the antecedent are identified. Also salient are inalienable possession and semantic type of the verb. The effect of inalienable possession shows the highly abstract transfer of substrate features, raising questions about the modularity of grammar. It is argued that a key motivation for such transfer is not just linguistic availability, but the social and cultural significance of different kinds of possession in Melanesia.

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van de Weijer, Jeroen, and Marjoleine Sloos. "Acquiring markedness constraints." Linguistics in the Netherlands 2013 30 (November 18, 2013): 188–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/avt.30.14van.

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This paper questions the assumption made in classic Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993 [2004]) that markedness constraints are an innate part of Universal Grammar. Instead, we argue that constraints are acquired on the basis of the language data to which L1 learning children are exposed. This is argued both on general grounds (innateness is an assumption that should not be invoked lightly) and on the basis of empirical evidence. We investigate this issue for six general markedness constraints in French, and show that all constraints could be acquired on the basis of the ambient data. Second, we show that the order of acquisition of the marked structures matches the frequency of violations of the relevant constraints in the input quite well. This argues in favour of a phonological model in which constraints are acquired, not innate, i.e. a model in which grammatical notions such as constraints are derived from language use.

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Winters, Margaret E., Maria Manoliu-Manea, and Glanville Price. "Discourse and Pragmatic Constraints on Grammatical Choices: A Grammar of Surprises." Language 73, no. 1 (March 1997): 175. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/416605.

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Schleppegrell, Mary J. "Discourse and pragmatic constraints on grammatical choices: A grammar of surprises." Journal of Pragmatics 26, no. 3 (September 1996): 446–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(96)82453-2.

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ROBERTS, JULIE. "Acquisition of variable rules: a study of (-t, d) deletion in preschool children." Journal of Child Language 24, no. 2 (June 1997): 351–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000997003073.

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The present study examined the pattern of deletion of final /t/ and /d/ in word final consonant clusters in sixteen three- and four-year-old children and their degree of mastery of phonological and grammatical constraints to answer the following questions: how and when is this variable rule acquired, and how does its acquisition relate to the learning of the categorical rule of past tense formation? Sixteen children were tape recorded in their South Philadelphia day care centre. In addition, eight of their mothers were interviewed in their homes for purposes of comparison.Results of the study revealed that children as young as three had, for the most part, mastered the phonological constraints on (-t, d) deletion. They matched the adult pattern including the constraint of following pause disfavouring deletion, the only one that has been shown to vary according to geographical dialect. The children also made a consistent and adult-like distinction between the grammatical forms of monomorpheme and weak past tense. Their high rate of deletion in semi-weak verbs, which differs from adult patterns, suggests that the children are demonstrating rule acquisition based on an analysis of verbal inflection.

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VANDEVENTER, ANNE. "Creating a grammar checker for CALL by constraint relaxation: a feasibility study." ReCALL 13, no. 1 (May 2001): 110–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s095834400100101x.

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Intelligent feedback on learners’ full written sentence productions requires the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and, in particular, of a diagnosis system. Most syntactic parsers, on which grammar checkers are based, are designed to parse grammatical sentences and/or native speaker productions. They are therefore not necessarily suitable for language learners. In this paper, we concentrate on the transformation of a French syntactic parser into a grammar checker geared towards intermediate to advanced learners of French. Several techniques are envisaged to allow the parser to handle ill-formed input, including constraint relaxation. By the very nature of this technique, parsers can generate complete analyses for ungrammatical sentences. Proper labelling of where the analysis has been able to proceed thanks to a specific constraint relaxation forms the basis of the error diagnosis. Parsers with relaxed constraints tend to produce more complete, although incorrect, analyses for grammatical sentences, and several complete analyses for ungrammatical sentences. This increased number of analyses per sentence has one major drawback: it slows down the system and requires more memory. An experiment was conducted to observe the behaviour of our parser in the context of constraint relaxation. Three specific constraints, agreement in number, gender, and person, were selected and relaxed in different combinations. A learner corpus was parsed with each combination. The evolution of the number of correct diagnoses and of parsing speed, among other factors, were monitored. We then evaluated, by comparing the results, whether large scale constraint relaxation is a viable option to transform our syntactic parser into an efficient grammar checker for CALL.

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Deshors, Sandra C. "A multifactorial approach to gerundial and to-infinitival verb-complementation patterns in native and non-native English." English Text Construction 8, no. 2 (November 20, 2015): 207–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/etc.8.2.04des.

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This multifactorial corpus-based study focuses on verb-complementation constructions (Marcus started to draw a picture vs. Marcus started drawing a picture) and contrasts 3,119 occurrences of gerundial and to-infinitival constructions across native and non-native (ESL) English varieties. Using logistic regression modeling, I analyze how grammatical contexts constrain the syntactic choices of American and Hong Kong English speakers. The regression model reveals a level of complexity in the uses of gerundial/to-infinitival complements that had so far remained unnoticed. Specifically, speakers make syntactic decisions based on comprehensive grammatical contexts rather than single isolated semantic parameters (as previously reported). Further, for the two types of speakers different grammatical features play an influential role in the association of a given predicate with a particular complement type. This suggests that the two speaker populations do not share the same abstract knowledge of the semantic and morpho-syntactic constraints associated with each of the investigated type of complementation. Ultimately, this study shows that combining cognitively oriented theoretical frameworks with rigorous empirical corpus approaches helps distinguish what motivates native and ESL speakers’ syntactic choices.

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Meng, Hai-Rong, and Takeshi Nakamoto. "Discourse particles in Chinese–Japanese code switching: Constrained by the Matrix Language Frame?" International Journal of Bilingualism 22, no. 1 (July 13, 2016): 100–122. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367006916658712.

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Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The purpose of this paper is to clarify the grammatical constraints on discourse particles in Chinese–Japanese intra-sentential code switching in light of the general framework of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model augmented by the 4-M model. Design/methodology/approach: This study retrieves data collected for three years from three Chinese–Japanese bilingual children aged between 2;1 and 5;0. Data and analysis: The database consists of nearly 300 hours of spontaneous conversations that are audio-recorded from the families of the three bilingual children, as well as diary entries. It shows that a large number of code switching utterances involve discourse particles. Findings/conclusions: Qualitative analyses of the data indicate that discourse particles are generally constrained by the MLF, yet they do not fit into any category of the 4-M model. Morphologically bound, discourse particles represent the information structure of a sentence (as in the Japanese topic marker - wa) or encode constraints on the inferential processes (as in the Japanese complementizer - kara) rather than truth-conditional information. They manifest some idiosyncrasy at the interface of syntax and pragmatics, and set up the MLF at a discourse level. Thus, the MLF model is extended from a merely syntactic level to the syntax–discourse interface. Originality: The present work has contributed empirical evidence from a hitherto undocumented language pair of Chinese and Japanese, and made theoretical explorations on the linguistic constraints of discourse particles. Significance/implications: On one hand, it is work that provides support for the robust nature of universality of the MLF constraints on code switching. On the other hand, discourse particles exhibit typological features that need further theoretical exploration in order to make a more comprehensive account for the grammatical constraints on Chinese–Japanese code switching.

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Dyrka, Witold, Mateusz Pyzik, François Coste, and Hugo Talibart. "Estimating probabilistic context-free grammars for proteins using contact map constraints." PeerJ 7 (March 18, 2019): e6559. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6559.

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Interactions between amino acids that are close in the spatial structure, but not necessarily in the sequence, play important structural and functional roles in proteins. These non-local interactions ought to be taken into account when modeling collections of proteins. Yet the most popular representations of sets of related protein sequences remain the profile Hidden Markov Models. By modeling independently the distributions of the conserved columns from an underlying multiple sequence alignment of the proteins, these models are unable to capture dependencies between the protein residues. Non-local interactions can be represented by using more expressive grammatical models. However, learning such grammars is difficult. In this work, we propose to use information on protein contacts to facilitate the training of probabilistic context-free grammars representing families of protein sequences. We develop the theory behind the introduction of contact constraints in maximum-likelihood and contrastive estimation schemes and implement it in a machine learning framework for protein grammars. The proposed framework is tested on samples of protein motifs in comparison with learning without contact constraints. The evaluation shows high fidelity of grammatical descriptors to protein structures and improved precision in recognizing sequences. Finally, we present an example of using our method in a practical setting and demonstrate its potential beyond the current state of the art by creating a grammatical model of a meta-family of protein motifs. We conclude that the current piece of research is a significant step towards more flexible and accurate modeling of collections of protein sequences. The software package is made available to the community.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Grammatical constraints'

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